The current knee replacement market is a crowded space, with an increasing number of companies offering a myriad of partial, primary/total, and revision prostheses to meet orthopedic surgeons demands in the management of knee diseases, primarily osteoarthritis. Worldwide, the primary/total knee segment represents about 8090% of the entire knee market, with the remainder being partial knee and revision knee. Overall, clinical data show that short- to medium-term survivorship is excellent after almost all common types of knee replacement, regardless of fixation, constraint, and bearing type. Future competition among vendors will be more likely to center on the instrumentation and the ancillary equipment, such as patient-specific instruments, navigation systems, and robotic systems.

Similarly, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the expanding patient population for orthopedic surgical treatments, the widespread appreciation of the clinical efficacy of knee replacement, and the steady domestic supply of orthopedic devices in the European countries have all contributed to a stable increase in the procedure volume in the past decades. However, the recent European sovereign debt crisis is putting pressure on the 5EU countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK) to put measures in place to prevent excessive healthcare budget deficits.